Rush To Judgment Casts AMD Ryzen In Critical Light

AMD's return to a competitive footing versus Intel in desktop PC processors is quite likely the story of the decade in the computing sector. However, after rushed, day-one reviews of the chips detailed a few soft spots in performance -- specifically lower resolution 1080p gaming -- some have run away with headlines and generalized opinions that don't take into consideration the realities of early release, cutting-edge semiconductor products, especially something as complex as a brand new CPU platform architecture. If there's one thing I've learned in almost two decades of both selling and covering semiconductor platform technologies as a sales engineer and press media, it's that optimization of hardware, firmware and software can make a world of difference after a new product has a few months of maturity under its belt. It's easy to see why many were alarmed about Ryzen's uncharacteristic early shortcomings in gaming. After all, the massive and growing PC gaming industry and its passionate enthusiast following will be the bread and butter market for AMD's hot new 8-core Ryzen processors. However, too few have taken the collective deep breath to view this data point for what it is, currently at least, a "corner case."

AMD Ryzen Processor In Motherboard Socket

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As I spoke with many of my colleagues, both analysts and press media, it was clear that universally everyone was seeing the same lower performance metrics for AMD Ryzen chips. When game benchmarks were dialed back to 1920X1080 resolutions (1080p), Ryzen was uncharacteristically slower than its Intel counterparts, sometimes by as much as 30% - 40%. This shortcoming flies in the face of virtually every other benchmark condition and result we've seen so far with the chips, from heavy-duty workstation number crunching, rendering and content creation, to standard everyday productivity compute tasks that require simple, fast short-burst IO response times. Here, Ryzen goes toe-to-toe with Intel Core and even beats it in spots. And when you dial resolutions back up, Ryzen processors easily keep pace with Intel's core-for-core in gaming. However, in that case, the test condition is essentially a graphics benchmark, since the majority of the processing is being done on the GPU rather than the CPU.

My early thoughts were that getting on and off chip with Ryzen was exhibiting some sort of intrinsic round-trip latency or bug, since when tasked with pure compute workloads Ryzen is so strong versus significantly more expensive Intel chips. Others thought Ryzen was having issues with its power states, dropping into a lower power mode inadvertently under this test condition, indicative perhaps of a BIOS firmware issue. Regardless, the more we kicked this around in the community, along with some of wide swings in performance seen between motherboard vendors and version, the more this began to feel, in my opinion, like typical early silicon architecture growing pains.

AMD Ryzen CPU Retail Boxes

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In fact, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su underscored in a reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) that gamers "should expect gaming performance to only get better with time as the developers have more time with 'Zen." Dr. Su went on to note that she expects 1080p performance with Ryzen will see measurable gains down the road and in future iterations of Zen2 and Zen3. In addition, AMD Corporate VP of Marketing John Taylor noted that AMD is on track to deliver thousands of developer kits to game devs for Ryzen optimization in 2017, which will help spur Ryzen-optimized game titles.

The bottom line is, it's too early to tell what's causing Ryzen to fall short in 1080p game testing and both ecosystem board partners, game developers and AMD itself are all still ironing out the kinks with the Ryzen platform. We have to remember that Intel's Core series architecture has held such a dominant position for so long, that the vast majority of game engines developed in the last decade have likely been optimized on Intel architecture as a baseline first and foremost. It will take some time for game patches, BIOS and CPU microcode updates to roll out that could very well further optimize Ryzen performance across a number of metrics, including 1080p gaming.

It's entirely possible as well, of course, that there is some sort of errata in the current chips, in terms of memory and/or IO latency, such that certain application use cases will remain a soft spot for Ryzen performance. However, since much of the tech media and developer community has only had Ryzen in their hands for about a week, it seems way too early to say definitively that what we're seeing of AMD Ryzen performance right now is representative of its full capabilities.